When former SAS troop commander Mark Wales cradled his baby boy Harry in his arms for the first time, he wondered how anyone could ever hurt a child.
WARNING: This article deals with child sexual abuse and depictions of war.
They were so innocent, trusting and defenceless.
His mind cast back to when he was a young ankle-biter, growing up in a red dust cul-de-sac on the cusp of Western Australia's Pilbara region.
But what should have been happy childhood memories were eclipsed by the sexual abuse he and his older brother Steven suffered at the hands of a family member on a WA dairy farm in the 1980s.
Mark is arguably best known for winning the television series Survivor.
Others may recall him serving in Afghanistan as part of the Special Air Service Regiment in the Australian Army.
But he has never publicly spoken about the abuse he endured until now.
Mark described walking into the Northbridge police station in 2019 to report the crimes as the hardest thing he had ever had to do.
He told the ABC it took more courage than walking through minefields in the Middle East.
After four decades, the brothers' abuser Richard Ernest Jackson was this month convicted of indecent dealings with children under 14 and jailed for two years and four months.
Mark and Steven said although the process was challenging, they were grateful to finally have closure.
Growing up on the dusty Pilbara plains
Steven and Mark were both born in Newman — an iron ore town 1,100 kilometres north-east of Perth.
With parents working in the mines, the brothers spent their days meandering barefoot across the outback.
They said people in the country were usually friendly and kind.
They were once passengers in a four-wheel drive when it broke down in the middle of the desert.
The sun had set so the young boys trekked to the highway and luckily managed to snag a lift back into town with a stranger.
Their trust was still intact.
"Growing up in that era was a simpler period, Australia was a totally different country back then," Mark said.
"We were kind of free-range kids. Always owned bikes. It was good."
Mark was outdoorsy and academic. Steven would build go-karts by hand.
"[Mark] was shit scared of the Hulk, he used to run and hide behind the sofa," Steven joked.
Mark dreamt of becoming an astronaut and Steven had aspirations of being a fighter pilot.
They moved around a bit as kids, but had a normal childhood before the abuse began.
The sexual abuse: 'As clear as a high-definition video'
Steven and Mark would often venture to the South West town of Cookernup, just north of Harvey about 130km south of Perth, to visit their grandparents.
The area was and still is an agricultural powerhouse, home to milk and meat production as well as a prosperous citrus industry.
Their abuser was their mother's cousin who operated a dairy farm. The assaults occurred when the boys were visiting the farm.
Mark remembers Jackson attempting to separate him from his brother.
"I remember in one instance he put me on a quad bike and was riding around with me and he started touching my genitals," Mark said.
"And then he took me to the milk shed and did the same thing, but more … more physically that time."
Mark was just six years old.
"It was super confronting. You trust adults when you're a kid, you don't think they're going to do anything wrong."
Steven was just eight when he was first abused.
"One of the times I was left alone with him in the milk shed and that's when it … that's when it happened to me," Steven said.
"I remember being very confused, it's very kind of … um … the words don't come … it's kind of a feeling that I've never felt since or before."
The 44-year-old said the ordeal was burnt into his brain.
"I can picture it now … he [Jackson] was down in the bottom of the pit [of the dairy] when he pulled my pants down and [abused me] and I can picture it. It's like a high-definition video, it's so clear in my mind.
"I actually struggled more than I thought. I thought I'd be fine but it was tough.
"It affected my sleep. I started withdrawing a lot."
Mark described Jackson as manipulative.
"He was smart, he'd put people at ease [by saying], 'Yeah I'll take the kids'. Humorous guy, a bit charismatic, but he knew exactly what he was doing," Mark said.
The boys talked about the incidents with each other, but never told any adults until they were in their teenage years.
They tried to suppress the pain in the hope it would go way. It never did.
Why did Mark join the military?
Mark joined the military at 17. He still questions whether he joined because of the abuse.
"I think it had something to do with me being in the military and trying to be in control of my environment — never getting in that situation again," Mark said.
"I think if you've been in a situation where you're helpless … I remember [being] utterly helpless against this guy because he was bigger, stronger, could do what whatever he wanted.
"It definitely created that sense of, 'I'll never be vulnerable again, I'll make sure that whatever happens in my life I'll be able to look after myself'."
Like Mark, Steven also worked to become physically strong. He became a body builder and competed professionally.
He later said it was not much fun.
Mark joined the SAS in 2004. It is a highly selective special operations division in the Army.
The troops are responsible for strategic hostage rescue, close-combat fighting and covert surveillance.
He did his first combat tour in the Middle East in 2007.
He said he found purpose in serving his country, but soon realised the Afghanistan mission was riddled with holes.
"The further I went into it, the more burnt out I was getting and people were getting overexposed to trauma and combat and you can take that to a point, but at some point you start running out of reserves."
Mark said he experienced combat-related depression and PTSD after losing mates at war.
"There's probably seven or eight guys I knew reasonably well [who died] and I even had a mate killed in training at the start, the Black Hawk crash in Fiji — he was in the helicopter and ended up drowning," he said.
"You band-aid yourself together and then you go back again and you'd come back and band-aid yourself again — you're constantly in that cycle."
Mark said he feared he too would die.
"On my first trip a car in front of me hit a roadside bomb and then later a bomb went off not far from my house in the middle of Kabul.
"There was danger around … when you're in minefields … it's high stress."
Mark struggled with his identity when he finally left the military.
He recalled signing up for the television show Survivor in 2017 because it was similar to his war experience.
It requires contestants to work strategically and face challenges to survive on a remote island.
During the show, Mark fell in love and later married fellow contestant Sam Gash.
They now have a four-year-old son named Harry.
Deciding to report the abuse after having a child of his own
Mark said he decided to speak up about the childhood abuse following the birth of his son.
"When you've got your own kid, that's when I started thinking about it more … I can't believe someone would take advantage of a defenceless kid," Mark said.
"It's this egregious breach of everything, trust, decency, a young life.
"Then you realise it probably did affect you more than you realised."
Mark and Steven met with a detective working in Perth's historic child sex unit to report the crimes for the first time in 2019.
"She believed us right away," Mark said.
"I was expecting a huge amount of obstacles, but it was kind of the opposite, they went and did all the digging around this and they uncovered a lot."
Steven said the reporting process was "nowhere near as tough" as he expected.
Jackson had abused more children
After lengthy delays in the middle of the COVID pandemic, the matter went to trial, forcing Steven and Mark to be cross-examined in front of a jury in court.
Steven said it was tough seeing Jackson for the first time since he was a child (apart from at his grandfather's funeral).
Mark described the trial as emotionally difficult.
"We've waited a long time for it to be brought into the public light," Mark said.
He said the abuse had a bigger impact on him than war.
"It's kind of relative, because if you're a trained soldier and you're going to war, you're actually trained to survive that, but when you're a kid, you've got no mechanisms for coping with or understanding what's happened.
"It wasn't until we went through this trial that I realised this had a huge effect on my life and I never took the time to process it."
The court revealed Jackson, who is now 71, had a history of similar offences.
The former firefighter volunteer had been convicted of abusing four other boys between 1985 and 1988.
In sentencing this month, Judge Stephen Lemonis said the crimes had a degree of perversion and were committed through a position of trust, leaving one victim "frozen in terror".
The court heard Jackson now suffers from arthritis and is in need of a hip replacement. His risk of reoffending has been labelled "very low".
Jackson was sentenced to two years and four months imprisonment and will be eligible for parole in 14 months.
Overcoming challenges with courage and resilience
Following his stint in the Army, Mark went on to study at a US Ivy League business school. He then founded a military-style high-end fashion brand called Kill Kapture, which is based in New York.
He later released a book called Survivor: Life in the SAS and won this year's season of Survivor: Blood V Water.
Mark now works as a corporate speaker, motivating others to overcome challenges through courage and resilience.
Meanwhile, Steven is a small business owner and has a successful demolition start-up.
He said he was glad to see justice prevail.
"Going through the whole process brought it all back which was tough, but I think it's good it's all out there. Now it's a matter of moving forward and healing," Steven said.
"It shows that just because something bad happened, you don't have to go down a certain path in life, you can still have a fantastic and successful life."
Mark expressed gratitude towards those who believed him.
"We're grateful that the justice system was so good about it, the police were so good about it and our peers believed us when they looked at the evidence," Mark said.
"I'm proud of Steve, we could've just not done it, it would have been easy to just put it in the too hard basket [wondering if] we'd get a conviction. But we went down that path and I think it's a good part of the healing process."
The brothers encouraged any victims of child sex abuse to come forward, saying it was never too late to seek justice.
